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June 23, 2011

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Tim Pawlenty's campaign reacted with some indignation today to a Washington Post report that five of his highest-profile aides have been working without pay, and rejected the suggestion that this was either unusual or a savings measure for a cash-strapped campaign.

I asked Pawlenty's most fully engaged, nearly unpaid (another staffer says he works so much that the FEC requires he be paid something) aide, Phil Musser about it, and he emailed me this afternoon:

We all are consultants, not volunteers, and work for low rates because we wanted to set an example for others. We also believe strongly in Tim Pawlenty, and we wanted to do our part to minimize overhead as the campaign got going. This approach was agreed to and has been in place since the inception of the campaign and has not changed at all.

We also have all maxed out personally to the campaign.

The Post story TOTALLY missed it.

That may be a different model than other campaigns but I have found donors, teammates, and supporters appreciate that we are putting OUR money where our mouth is, and nobody wonders where our loyalties lie. It makes for a very positive team environment and I recommend it to others.

I admit I was surprised that the group is unpaid; they're people who make their livings in politics. That's partly because they were rolled out as formal aides to his PAC in 2009, with a release that phrased it this way:

Providing management, strategic and political planning will be a cadre of campaign veterans serving as senior advisors, including Phil Musser, President of New Frontier Strategy and former executive director of the Republican Governors Association; Terry Nelson, Partner, Mercury Public Affairs and former RNC and Bush-Cheney 2004 political director; and Sara Taylor, President of BlueFront Strategies and former White House political director. Former FEC Chairman Michael Toner of Bryan Cave, LLP will serve as the PAC’s counsel.

There was, Musser points out, no parallel release for the campaign. But if their unpaid status was a point of pride, they hadn't been advertising it.